Secretary / Personal Assistant

We are looking on behalf of our client, a well established law firm in Gibraltar, for a Secretary / Personal Assistant to provide a first-class professional support
service to their fee earners.

Duties include, but are not limited to:

• Act as a first point of contact and liaison for clients and colleagues, building effective working relationships and acting as gatekeeper for fee earners by answering and screening telephone calls, assisting callers, taking accurate messages and redirecting enquiries to other relevant fee-earners where necessary.
• Email inbox management
• Type correspondence and documents and prepare and send short holding, covering or similar letters on behalf of fee earners when required.
• Develop and maintain an extensive knowledge of the fee earners’ clients, work in progress and projects and be aware of priorities, potential issues and sensitivities.
• Participate in regular work planning with allocated fee earner(s) to review client work activities and requirements.
• Assist with client and matter opening and related processes including processing new matter requests, starting electronic filing, applying billing rates and preparing engagement letters.
• Organise and maintain electronic and hard copy document management systems.
• Carry out health check and “tidy” of documents and standard templates.
• Maintain and update client and other relevant contact details on AIM database and Outlook.
• Manage the diaries of allocated fee earner(s) in Microsoft Outlook
• Organise extensive international travel, business trips and itineraries for fee earners including sourcing and booking flights, hotels and transport and preparing door-to-door travel packs
• Booking client and/or inter-office meetings, arrange conference calls and organise client lunches, dinners, workshops, conferences, seminars and other events including booking
  restaurants locally and abroad.
• Book equipment, prepare papers and draft agendas for meetings and take minutes, as required.
• Undertake audio and copy typing, photocopying, scanning and faxing of documents and preparation of trial bundles.
• Prepare and process relevant finance forms including submission of expense claims, payment requisition forms, returned advances and disbursements ensuring allocation to appropriate budgets.
• Carry out mobile phone reallocation and reclaim process.
• Support fee earners with priority client and business development initiatives including researching information for and preparing animated or graphical client presentations, papers, reports, pitch documentation, invitations, CVs and other client packs or event materials working with the Firm’s in-house Marketing and Business Development function as required.
• Assist fee earners with HR-related administration tasks including accurately recording absence of team members, management of team annual leave requests, maintenance of up-to-date CPD/learning records and provision of administrative support at appraisal time.

Requirements:

• Sound intellectual skills evidenced by a strong academic background including formal secretarial qualifications, further training and experience or educated to graduate level.
• Must hold at least 5 GCSEs (A-C) or equivalent, to include Mathematics and English.
• Solid, recent PA/secretarial experience at partner or director level preferably gained within a professional services environment or partnership.
• Experience of fee/billing management and financial tasks.
• Able to draft, type, format, prepare and produce a wide range of high quality documentation, correspondence, statistical information, graphics, presentations and short reports displaying sound grammar and legal terminology.
• Advanced technical skills – accurate audio and copy typing circa 60 + wpm.
• Excellent knowledge of Microsoft Office, particularly Outlook, Word, PowerPoint and Excel and used to working with house-styles and ‘problem’ documents.